Aesthetics and Literature: A Problematic Relation?

The paper argues that there is a proper for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aestehtic pleasure associating with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature of merely "fine writing". Bellelettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are to other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature - both poetry and prose fiction - invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it.